UPDATE: I learn that The Devil’s Excrement and Armas del Coronel blogs had these documents years ago. I missed them at the time. Credit where due!
Oil geeks and Venezuela-watchers might remember that in early 2010, a delegation of Venezuelans went to China to request a $40 billion loan and came back with a new $4 billion loan. This was the first part of the ongoing lending by China of money to Venezuela to be repaid in crude oil and fuel oil. That in turn led to new agreements in 2011. These deals have gotten a lot of attention, but much of what has been said has been poorly backed by information about the real content of the Venezuela-China deals.
Turns out, a collection of financial documents about these deals has been online since late 2011. Here you go, yours at no extra charge. Most of them appear to be late-phase drafts, rather than signed documents. But they are certainly close enough to final that they can give people discussing these deals a bit of grounding in reality, rather than the just making stuff up.
Included in this collection:
A trip report for President Chávez, describing exactly what happened in Beijing on the trip from February 2 to 4, 2010.
Agreed Framework Agreement 18 March 2011. Of all the documents, this is the only one that has had significant viewership, having been seen 58,000 times. The rest have fewer than 1,000 views.
The Four-Party Agreement between Venezuela’s PDVSA oil company and BANDES development bank and China’s CNPC oil company and CDB bank, also from 18 March 2011
An agreement on how BANDES’s account at the China Development Bank will be managed (interest rates and such), also from 18 March 2011 (plus an appendix)
An oil contract dated 18 March 2011, which includes the oft-misrepresented freight formula, an immunity waiver, phone numbers and e-mails for PDVSA’s sales executives,
Estimates of “excedentes” dated 18 March 2011
Enjoy!
Setty's notebook 